Category: Tech

Technical stuff, Gadets, Linux related things

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Google impliments Portable Contacts

http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/03/take-your-google-contacts-with-you.html

“Lots of websites ask you to invite your friends when you sign up, and for good reason; the web is more fun when you can share your experiences with other people. However, too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists. The problem is that once a website has your password, it can access all sorts of data, not just your contacts.

Portable Contacts to the rescue! Portable Contacts (affectionately known as “PoCo”) is an open standard that aims to make it easier to access “who-you-know” information in a secure way — this means sites don’t have to employ the “password anti-pattern” of scraping websites.

Using PoCo is ‘easy’ to use because it builds on existing standards and libraries. In fact, PoCo uses the same data format as the OpenSocial REST protocol. The ‘secure’ part is provided by OAuth, an authentication mechanism that allows users to grant access to only certain sets of data (address books in this case).

Web developers can now access Google Contacts using the OAuth and Portable Contacts standards. To test this out, you first need to Register your Domain and get an OAuth key. Then you can use Plaxo’s Portable Contacts test client to send some test queries. Just enter your OAuth key, hit the “Grant Access” button to authorize access to your Google Contacts, and start submitting queries to see PoCo in action. For more information, check out the Portable Contacts Developer’s Guide on code.google.com or visit portablecontacts.net.”

And another write up about it at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_implements_new_open_standard_for_friends_li.php


Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user’s list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

Personally, i see the good points in it, but ill hold back judgement until its been about for a while. No doubt there will be the bunch that jump up and down and scream ‘invasion of privacy!’! But that asied it would be handy, considering ive just moved email addresses and the thing i miss most is that i couldnt import/export contacts in any decent fashion.

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Interesting ipv6 combinations

Apon talking about about IPV6 addresses on IRC with some friends, I made the comment that the addresses are hard to remember. So conversation went along the lines of using phone numbers, or making ipv4 go above 255, and pretty much every other stupid idea we could think of.
But then we realized, IPV6 is actually not to bad to remember, you just have to make sure you have some great groupings!

feed:cafe
beef:babe
dd::b00b:135

About this time i googled and found the following page

We thought it was time for some fun of the geekier kind. If you know what IPv6 is, this should be something for you.

You may have seen IPv6 addresses that contain a couple of actual words. Here is a made-up example: babe:f432:42aa:8271:eee6:1076:dead:beef

Now what if we take this one step further, and construct entire sentences inside IPv6 addresses instead of just a few words? We decided to do just that, and here is how we did it.

Constructing words inside IPv6 addresses

When showing an IPv6 address a hexadecimal notation is used. The hexadecimal digits are 0-9 and A-F (the latter corresponding to the values 10-15).

A 128-bit IPv6 address is written as 8 sets of 4 hexadecimal digits. Since initial zeroes can be skipped in each set, we can include words that are 4, 3, 2 or 1 characters long.

When constructing words, we can use the letters A-F, of course, since they are already letters. Then, to give us a few more letters to play with, we decided to include some leet-style interpretations of the numbers 0-9. (As you’re probably starting to notice, we’re a pretty geeky crowd here at Pingdom. ;) )

We went with: 0 = o or . , 1 = i or l, 2 = R, 5 = S, 6 = b, 7 = T, 9 = g.

So in the end we have the following letters to construct words with: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, i, l, o, r, s, t

Now on to constructing some actual sentences!

IPv6 addresses that make sense (sort of)

The “IPv6 sentences” below are not existing addresses we’ve found. We made them up. But although they’re just made up they are nevertheless correct and could be used in the real world.

Unfortunately we didn’t have the necessary letters to include words like “ping”, “tcp”, “http”, “down” and many others we would have liked to have in our word arsenal, but we had a lot of fun putting various sentences together over a couple of after-work beers.

Here are some of the better ones we came up with:

Happy sysadmin
2007:15:900d:0:2007:15:90d:0

(root is good. root is god.)

Fearful sysadmin
dea2:g0d:0:1a57:b007:1057:a11:da7a

(dear god. last boot lost all data)

da7a:1055:0:900d:90d::1:dead

(data loss. good god. i dead)

700:1a7e:70:face:b055::f1ee:f1ee

(too late to face boss. flee flee)

(Almost a bit of storytelling there… )

The Digg (Slashdot) effect
1f:d199:517e:02:b109:15:fa57:dead

(if digg site or blog is fast dead)

Ideal IP address for Icanhascheezburger.com
1075:0f:101:ca75:f111:a11:b109:da7a

(lots of lol cats fill all blog data)

or just:

101:ca75:101:ca75:101:ca75:101:ca75

(lol cats lol cats lol cats lol cats)

A perspective on web robots and crawlers
9e7:1057:02:d1e:b075:0:0:0

(get lost or die bots . . .)

Can’t leave them cats alone
1f:ca7:5ee5:b12d::ca7:eat5:b12d

(if cat sees bird, cat eats bird)

The truth about beer
1ce:c01d:bee2:15:a5:900d:a5:11fe

(ice cold beer is as good as life)

For ad-crazy sites
517e:ad5:f02:5a1e:0:f111:ca27:0